Mestra Cigana

Fátima Colombiano, known as Mestra Cigana, was born on June 23, 1956, in Volta Redonda, Rio de Janeiro. She began practicing capoeira in 1970 in Belém, Pará, under Mestre Bezerra — described, in a 2011 interview, as the only active mestre in the city at the time. She received her first capoeira batizado in 1971, and left Belém in 1973.

In 1975 she met Mestre Canjiquinha in São Paulo and followed him to Salvador, Bahia, continuing her training there. After five years of dedicated study, she was consecrated mestra by Canjiquinha in 1980, becoming, per multiple sources, the first woman officially recognized as a capoeira mestra in Brazil. A 2023 academic study (Conexões journal, UNICAMP) places Cigana among the earliest documented female mestras in the country, alongside Tonha Rolo do Mar and Sandrinha.

Her nickname "Cigana" ("Gypsy") was given by Mestre Leopoldina in Rio de Janeiro, in reference to her nomadic, unconventional lifestyle, which she also carried into her capoeira game.

Back in Volta Redonda in 1980, she founded the Associação de Mestre Canjiquinha, training roughly a hundred students, among them Mestras Luana and Arara. She later founded the Associação Cigana Capoeira, through which she trained about twenty instructors, and ran an academy in Angra dos Reis that reached around 1,200 students before its affiliation with the state federation. She served as president of the Federação de Capoeira do Estado do Rio de Janeiro — cited as the only woman to have presided over a state capoeira federation in Brazil — and was the first mestra certified by the Brazilian Boxing Confederation (Confederação Brasileira de Pugilismo).

She faced sustained resistance from male teachers and mestres throughout her career — one of the reasons she never stayed long affiliated with a single group — and rejection from her own family over her choice to pursue capoeira. She earned a degree in Physical Education in 1982 specifically so she could teach capoeira in schools, later adding degrees in Pedagogy and Philosophy from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).